Backup and Restore Kontakt Libraries the fast way.

Restoring your Kontakt Libraries the easy way.

Hello family! In this article I’m gonna show you how you can transfer your contact libraries from one computer to another.

Let’s say if you’re gonna reinstall windows or install the new version of Windows, how you can transfer your libraries quickly and be back up and running in no time.

Now let’s start with a brand new computer with Windows 10.

If we open Kontakt you can see that there’s no libraries added. We have the library on disk, but it’s not showing in the libraries tab. Now usually you would have to go up and click on the add library” tab to find your library. The problem is that you’re only allowed to transfer one library at a time. As you might guess this could be very time consuming! If we go to the file tab, and choose one of the libraries you can get a message saying that you have to add the library first, which makes us go back to square one where we have to add the library one by one. For professionals who have a lot of libraries, let’s say 30 or 50 libraries plus, it would take a long time to add all of the libraries manually. You could do it, but this article is going to show you how you can transfer all of your libraries without having to click the “add libraries tab.

Now the first step in order to transfer your libraries is to actually transfer the libraries themself.

1. Transfer your Kontakt Libraries to the new disk.

Go to my computer, we can see that we have two drives, and on the second Drive, the Z drive, for example, we have our contact libraries, and it is very important that you have the exact same directory structure as you had on your previous computer, on your new computer, so on our previous computer we had all of our libraries in the Z Drive, and the contact libraries, Native Instruments and so on. So, you want to maintain that same directory structure, so first of course transfer all of your libraries, which we have done already, and now I’ll show you how you can get all the libraries up, and running in Kontakt

2. Backup the registry.

Let’s go back to the old computer to back up some Kontakt registry files first, so we’re going to go back to the old computer, so now we are back on our old machine again, and if we open the registry editor, we’re going to locate a file called Native Instruments, and local machine, and export it.

Normally if you don’t know how, you would just click on the Start menu, type regedit, and open this window, and you can see local machine up here. We want to expand it, go to software, and Native Instruments. It’s important that you choose the Native Instruments folder under local machine, and not current user or any other key. As you can see Native Instruments contains all of the libraries that we have added to our old machine and so we want to export this and then import it onto our new machine. So we’re going to right click this Native Instruments key, click on export, and you can place it wherever you want, and give it a name that you can recognize. We can call it local machine_Native Instruments. Click on save, and we can close the registry editor, and now you can see that we have the file over here.

Next step is to transfer this file to your new computer. You can use cloud storage or a USB stick or whatever you want. Just make sure it’s easy to find.

3. Import the new registry.

So now we’re going to go back to our new computer with Windows 10. So, now we’re on our new machine. Before we do anything more we have to backup our registry! It’s always important to backup your registry before you make any changes in case something goes wrong.

Go to the Start menu, and type regedit. Click enter. Now to navigate to the local machine, software and Native Instruments, or you can actually just back up your whole registry. Click on export. Call it a name you can remember and back it up. You save it on the desktop just in case something goes wrong.

So, now we’ll have to locate the registry key that we exported in our old machine, and in this case I have it here. All you need to do is to double click on it, click on yes, and it’s going to ask if you want to import the registry to your computer. Click on yes. It will notify you that it has been successfully added to the registry. Click OK.

So now, if we open kontakt again, you can see that all of the libraries have been added to the libraries tab without having to click on the add libraries tab over and over again. You can see it’s a lot of Kontakt libraries, you might have noticed that the libraries are giving you a message saying “library content not found”.

Click on locate to set the content, and this is because I didn’t actually physically transfer all of the kontakt libraries to my new computer. I just transferred one, for demonstration purposes. If we try to load up one of the instruments, you can see that it’s working perfectly.

That’s how you transfer your kontakt libraries from one machine to another machine!

If you have any questions just leave it in the comments below!

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